Old San Francisco (1927)

WHO: Alan Crosland was the director of this film; in 1961 William K. Everson called him "sadly underrated by historians" and I don't think his stock has been rated much higher in the decades since then.

WHAT: By no means an example of silent-era movie-making at it's highest artistic level, Old San Francisco is nonetheless a fascinating curiosity, especially for anyone interested in how San Francisco's Chinatown and the 1906 earthquake were depicted in the silent era.

Beyond some stock photography of city views, the production was made entirely on Hollywood sets.  Old San Francisco was the last of a string of films including Don Juan and When a Man Loves, each made by Crosland as silents and then released with Vitaphone disc musical scores in theatres wired for sound. His next film was his, and Hollywood's, first feature to include sequences with synchronized dialogue: The Jazz Singer. It's notable that this used San Francisco (in particular, the famed speakeasy Coffee Dan's) as the setting for the first appearance of star Al Jolson's voice in the film. According to the Warner DVD commentary recorded by Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano, this scene was actually shot in Los Angeles, meaning that again San Francisco is only actually seen on screen thanks to stock photography.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens on a program beginning at 7:30 tonight only at the Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum.

WHY: For those more interested in films shot on Frisco Bay than in those merely set on Frisco Bay, tonight's screening is still noteworthy, as Old San Francisco is accompanied by two brief documentaries made in 1906 (A Trip Down Market Street and The Destruction of San Francisco) which together depict the vast changes to the cityscape in April of that year. Yes, this is the Niles Film Museum's annual earthquake-themed show, timed to coincide with the anniversary of the most cataclysmic minute in the city's history. The actual anniversary is this Thursday, but the Museum doesn't traditionally hold screenings on Thursdays. 

There are likely to be more Frisco Bay films screening at Niles soon, including some surely shot in Niles itself, as the annual Broncho Billy Silent Film Festival has announced its dates (June 28-30) and even provided a teaser of a few titles. King Vidor's top-drawer Hollywood satire Show People, Lotte Reiniger's beautifully animated The Adventures of Price Achmed and the Gregory La Cava-directed Colleen Moore picture His Nibs are among those being dangled in front of us before the full program is announced. None of these are, to my knowledge, set or shot in the Bay Area, but Broncho Billy always screens a number of films produced by the Niles Essanay studio which the museum is named for and primarily devoted to.

The San Francisco Silent Film Festival has also announced, if only through a fundraising letter to members and friends of the festival, that a shot-in-San Francisco silent film called The Last Edition is expected to screen at it's annual Castro Theatre event in July. Another film, Allan Dwan's 1916 vehicle for Douglas Fairbanks called The Half-Breed, will also have its world premiere in a new restoration at that festival; according to Geoffrey Bell's The Golden Gate and the Silver Screen it was filmed at least partially near Boulder Creek in Santa Cruz County. A third title mentioned in the mailing, The Joyless Street, was filmed in Germany, of course, by G.W. Pabst in his pre-Pandora's Box days. The full program is expected to be announced May 23.

If you can't make it to Niles tonight, there are quite a few Frisco Bay-shot films screening tonight at the Victoria in the San Francisco Underground Short Film Festival. These are not silent-era films, but some of them are hilarious. I got quite a kick out of the dark comedy in Robb Grimes's two entries, Come To The Bridge and So Long And Thanks For All The Popcorn, both filmed at the sadly-shuttered Bridge Theatre. In fact, I believe the marquee there still has the letters of the latter title emblazoned for everyone traveling down Geary Street to see.

HOW: Old San Francisco and The Destruction of San Francisco will screen from 16mm prints, while A Trip Down Market Street will screen from a 35mm print. All will be accompanied by Greg Pane at the piano.

To The Wonder (2012)

WHO: Terence Malick wrote and directed.

WHAT: Let's just say this is the first time a single viewing of a Terence Malick film hasn't blown me away.

I absolutely loved The Thin Red Line. When it came out I saw it three times in the theatre. When I went back to look at Malick's earlier films Badlands and Days of Heaven I loved those too. When The New World arrived I though it was tremendous, perhaps his best yet. It felt like a privilege to see it in theatres. And though I had quibbles with The Tree of Life (surfacing whenever Sean Penn, who I normally like, showed up on screen) they were overshadowed to the point of being almost invisible in the grand scheme of the work, which felt like another sprint forward for a filmmaker who could have kept running in place and still lapped most of his fellow directors.

There's definitely a sense of the treadmill to To the Wonder however. Don't get me wrong. It's beautiful, and I wish I'd loved watching it as thoroughly as Nick Pinkerton and Bilge Ebiri and Richard Brody clearly did. Times like these, I wish I had the generosity of Roger Ebert, who in his final published review before his death admitted to having been put off at first by the film's opacity, yet was able to find enough to like to write an honest three-and-a-half (out of four) star assessment. I don't generally tinker with assigning star ratings to films, but my first instinct is that this is a two-and-a-half star film for me, with room for at least half a star of movement in either direction. Not so bad, really. If a lesser director (say, Jason Reitman) had made a film this good, it would be his best one yet. But Malick's other five features are all easily four-star masterpieces. I hope to revisit this one soon, in the hopes of something 'clicking' for me that helps me realize what I wasn't seeing (beyond the gorgeous visuals) the first time around.

I realize I've been terribly vague up to now, so here's what I think is the crux of my problem with To the Wonder: Ben Affleck. It's not his performance that's a problem, but his casting is, I think, a big one. The role that is essentially that of an unknowable cypher, representing as much a part of the American strangeness that the film's central Frenchwoman character (played marvelously by Olga Kurylenko) cannot overcome, as the romantic impetus for her decision to come here in the first place. But Affleck's star persona automatically fills in the blank spaces Malick has left in his drawing of the character. Kurylenko might as well be in love with Jim Young, the ruthlessly cocksure capitalist from Boiler Room or A.J. Frost, the none-too-bright oil driller from Armageddon or even Ben Affleck, the self-serious film director who talks about the "poet's truth" on Fresh Air. None of these personalities compute as someone who would attract a French single mother to live with him in Oklahoma, and since this love affair and resultant uprooting are the central concerns of the film, everything in the film threatens to crumble into uninvolving banality. Sometimes it really feels like it has.

WHERE/WHEN: Multiple daily showtimes all week at the Embarcadero and the California in Berkeley. If you attend the latter, try to catch one of the shows in the downstairs, handicap accessible theatre, which seems likely to be the biggest Frisco Bay screen to show this. 

WHY: Despite my rather sour experience watching this the first time around, I definitely think anyone who has enjoyed previous Terence Malick films, particularly The New World and The Tree of Life, its closet thematic and stylistic cousins, respectively, should see it. As I noted above, there are plenty of intelligent and passionate cinephiles and critics who have found more merit in it than I did, and reading their eloquent arguments has convinced me to have at least one more go of it. I'm not sure that this time I'll like it better than the spate of recent Malick-indebted releases I've seen recently. I'm thinking of Upstream Color (which opens for a commercial run at the Roxie today and is to my mind a far more surprising and satisfying feature) or Beasts of the Southern Wild (you might call Javier Bardem's character in To The Wonder a "Priest of the Southern Wild") or even Spring Breakers (which for me benefitted from featuring stars mostly of a generation I'm wholly unfamiliar with.) At the very least I'll be able to bask in cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezski's images on a big screen once more.

HOW: So far all Frisco Bay screenings of To The Wonder are expected to be digital. I've been told that there are at least one or two 35mm exhibition prints of this film struck, and hope we Frisco Bay audiences get a chance to see one at some point. Perhaps at the Castro sometime?

Last Life In The Universe (2003)

WHO: Thai director Pen-Ek Ratanaruang directed this.

WHAT: An often dreamlike tale of a shy, fastidious library assistant named Kenji (played by Tadanobu Asano) who has fled Japan for Bangkok in order to escape his yakuza family ties. A random accident leads to an encounter with a slovenly extrovert named Noi leads to an "opposites attract" romance between the pair. But there are bound to be complications...

Last Life In The Universe is probably Pen-ek's most widely admired film, and it forms a pivot point in his career. After making three plot-heavy, purely Thai films that proved his versatility in directing individual scenes with aplomb, he had never really put together a film that was completely structurally satisfying. With his fourth film, the director accepted international financing and both a foreign star (Asano) and cinematographer (Christopher Doyle, best known for his collaborations with Wong Kar-Wai). Though all these complications threw off his confidence during filming, the finished product found him a natural at maintaining a more languid pace and visually depicting his characters' interior emotions. Since this, he's made four more films that represent varied attempts at elaborating on this stylistic success.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts tonight only at 7:30 PM.

WHY: I was pleasantly surprised that YBCA curator Joel Shepard, while interviewing Pen-ek from the stage following last Thursday's opening to the six-film retrospective of his work, mentioned my name and the name of this blog while quoting the passage I borrowed for my recent post on Headshot. Thanks Joel, not just for the plug but for putting together a series like this that allows us to fill in gaps from this undervalued director's career, and revisit old favorites like Last Life in the Universe. After hearing Pen-ek talk about his films both publicly and in an interview I was able to conduct before he flew out of town, I'm more eager than ever to see my own personal favorite films on the big screen once again. I'm still in the midst of transcribing the interview but I'll keep readers posted when it's ready to be unveiled. In the meantime, enjoy the four remaining films in this series; Joel mentioned that the retrospective required the importing of 35mm prints from Europe as his work is no longer distributed in that form in the United States (and some of it, like this coming Sunday's Ploy, probably my second-favorite of his films, was never distributed in this country to begin with.)

Since this particular film is a Japanese co-production, it seems a worthwhile moment to mention that the next YBCA screening series will be an eight-title selection of genre films made at the Shintoho studio between 1956 and 1960. It kicks off May 9th with Ghost Story of Yostuya, directed by supernatural specialist Nobuo Nakagawa the year before he made his most famous film, Jigoku (a.k.a. Hell). None of these will be shown on film, I'm told, because there simply are no projectable and/or English-subtitled prints available anywhere in the world.

HOW: Last Life in the Universe screens from a 35mm print.

Eternity And A Day (1998)

WHO: Directed by Theo Angelopoulos, the master Greek filmmaker who was killed in a car accident at the age of 76 over a year ago.

WHAT: I haven't seen Eternity and a Day but it's certainly one of Angelopoulos's most lauded works. In fact it was awarded the top prize at the 1998 Cannes Film Festival (the Palme d'Or) a unanimous decision by a jury headed up by Martin Scorsese.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens today only at the Castro Theatre, at 4:20 and 9:20 PM.

WHY: The 2013 Cannes competition line-up isn't announced until next week, but already there are are people trying to guess at contenders for the top award. Of course, not every Palme d'Or winner truly stands the test of time as a great film (anyone want to make the case for Pelle the Conqueror or Fahrenheit 9/11 right now?) and in fact an upcoming screening series in New York called Booed At Cannes is a reminder of how a poor reception at Cannes screenings doesn't exactly doom a film to more obscurity than a good one does. (Although it's interesting to note that two Palme winners appear in that series: Taxi Driver and Wild At Heart.) I hope this series travels here, as there's hardly a film in it I wouldn't like to see (or re-see) on the big screen.

Upon sampling Angelopoulos's The Travelling Players on VHS years ago I realized that the big screen was the only place for me to really take in the Greek master's motion pictures, so I determined to wait for screenings to appear at local cinemas. It's been a long wait; as far as I know today's showings are the first 35mm screenings of one of his films here since The Weeping Meadow got a short run at the Balboa seven and a half years ago.

Other films that have won the top Cannes prize (not always called the Palme d'Or but that's a long and complicated story) that are set to screen in Frisco Bay theatres soon include Michaelangelo Antonioni's Blow Up next Wednesday at the Castro, Francesco Rosi's The Mattei Affair at the San Francisco International Film Festival, Wild At Heart and Pulp Fiction, which both screen in upcoming slots in the New Parkway's Thursday night "Parkway Classics" series, and Amour, the most recent winner and Eternity and a Day's double-bill-mate at the Castro today.

HOW: Eternity and a Day screens from a 35mm print, and its co-feature Amour is a digital production screened on DCP.

Into The Abyss (2011)

WHO: Werner Herzog directed this documentary.

WHAT: Here's how Roger Ebert began his November 2011 review:

Into the Abyss may be the saddest film Werner Herzog has ever made. It regards a group of miserable lives, and in finding a few faint glimmers of hope only underlines the sadness.

WHERE/WHEN: Screens 7:00 PM tonight only at the Pacific Film Archive in Berkeley.

WHY: Roger Ebert and Les Blank: two "men of cinema" who died of cancer in the past week. It's hard to believe they're gone. I already miss knowing they're around. I have a lot more to say about each of them, but no time to say it all, at least not yet.

For today, I just would like to acknowledge the link Werner Herzog was in a chain that connected one to the other. Though I think Nosferatu the Vampire was probably the first Herzog film I saw, back when I was a teenager and didn't really care about foreign films, it also may have been Aguirre: Wrath of God, which I liked even better. I know first watched the latter at around the same time, with my father, a religious viewer of Siskel & Ebert and the Movies. I remember looking it up afterwords in his copy of Roger Ebert's Home Movie Companion, which I suspect I consulted more frequently than he did, making the fact that I gave it to him as a birthday or Father's Day or Christmas gift seem rather suspect now that you mention it. 

Seeing that film and reading that review (I'm not even sure it was a full review; it may have just been a write-up accompanying its place on his 1982 all-time top 10 list) must have planted a seed that would eventually blossom into cinephilia in my post-college twenties (yes I'm a bit of a late bloomer compared to most cinephiles I know who were movie-mad by age 18 if not earlier).  It was in this period that I started catching up with Herzog's other films (an ongoing process as I've still yet to see a few, most notably Heart of Glass, which Ebert preferred to Aguirre as late as 1980), which led me of course to Fitzcarraldo and its inevitable companion Burden of Dreams, Les Blank's remarkable making-of documentary that's better than the original film. After a decade of watching Blank's films at least as fervently as I had Herzog's, I had the great privilege of interviewing him at his El Cerrito studio. I excerpted a piece from that interview on this blog just the other day, where I got to see the preserved remains of the shoe Herzog didn't quite finish during the event that Blank filmed and released as Werner Herzog Eats His Shoe.

Anyway, I'm sure that many who attend tonight's screening will be thinking of Herzog's connections to both Ebert and Blank. These connections aren't just a creation of my own cinephiliac nostalgia kicking in. Here's a link to audio and a transcript of Herzog's comments after hearing about Ebert's death.

HOW: Into the Abyss screens in 35mm.